Voice-of-customer (VoC) mining
Harvesting the exact words customers already use, from reviews, tickets, and calls, then writing in their words instead of yours.
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What it is
Voice-of-customer mining is research, not writing: you collect the exact phrases real customers already use and then build copy out of them instead of out of your team's internal vocabulary. The richest sources are the ones nobody curates. Three-star reviews (five-star ones are vague, one-star ones are angry), support tickets, sales call transcripts, churn and cancellation surveys, live chat logs, subreddit and Discord threads, and the site-search queries people type when they cannot find something. Joanna Wiebe's line for the whole practice: copy is not written, it is assembled.
The method is boring on purpose. Pull a few hundred verbatims, tag each one as a pain, a desired outcome, an objection, or a trigger event, then count repeated nouns and verbs. What you are hunting for is the word they reach for that you would never have written: they say 'it keeps eating my Saturdays', your homepage says 'streamlines workflows'. That phrase becomes the headline, and the objections become the FAQ.
Gotcha: mining is not quoting. Cherry-picking your favorite glowing sentence is testimonial hunting, which finds what you already believe. Reviews also skew to the extremes, so balance them with tickets and calls from the quiet middle. And a raw verbatim usually needs a light edit for rhythm before it survives as a headline: keep the customer's nouns and verbs, fix the grammar, and get permission before you attach anyone's name.
Ask AI for it
Act as a voice-of-customer analyst. Here are raw customer verbatims from reviews, support tickets, and sales calls: [customer verbatims]. Here is our current copy for the same things: [current company copy]. Tag every quote as pain, desired outcome, objection, or trigger event, then cluster them into themes and rank the themes by how often they appear. For each theme give me: the three most vivid verbatim quotes, the recurring nouns and verbs customers use, and the phrase we use instead, quoted from the supplied company copy. If no company copy is supplied for a theme, skip that column rather than guessing what we say. Finish with five headline options built only from customer language, no marketing adjectives, no words that did not appear in the source quotes.